For Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata, though, space-borne loneliness may be assuaged by a different kind of experiment. A team of researchers at Tokyo University -- along with the robot creator Tomotaka Takahashi and the ad agency Dentsu -- have been since 2011 spearheading a project to give Wakata some companionship during his upcoming stint on the station. That project? A small humanoid robot that will be sent into space to keep Wakata company. The android will be 13.4 inches tall and 2.2 pounds. It will arrive at the International Space Station next summer, a few months ahead of Wakata's own arrival. Its name is still to be determined -- by a public contest -- but it will look, per a sketch released yesterday, something like this:

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Tomotaka Takahashi via the Kibo Robot Project

Spacey! Yet for all the anime-ed cheekiness of the android's design, it was built to fulfill a fairly important purpose: to reduce the stress that astronauts naturally encounter as they're orbiting the Earth. "The robot would provide stress-relieving facial expressions and words (to the astronauts)," a representative from JAXA, Japan's space agency, told the Wall Street Journal when the project was announced last year. And it would do that in part by scanning astronauts' faces to detect any signs of stress, and -- slightly more creepily -- by taking pictures of them.

Which is to say: It would do basically (if not, of course, entirely) what a human companion would, simulating the intimacy of close proximity while not fully embracing it. That's significant, because while Wakata certainly won't be alone on the ISS -- he'll be accompanied by a team of fellow astro- and cosmonauts -- he'll be somewhat linguistically isolated from his fellow space travelers. Given the fact that his stint on the ISS, as the first Japanese commander of the low-orbit research facility, will last for six months ... that kind of connection to home could prove valuable, for Wakata and his crew. Particularly in the kind of high-stress situations that are not uncommon when the situations happen to be unfolding in space.

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But the robot will earn its keep in other ways, too. The amiable little android will act not just as a conversationalist, but also as a photographer -- of Wakata and the rest of the ISS's occupants. And it will also serve as a conduit of information between Earth and the Japanese Kibo laboratory on the space station, where it will spend its time while Wakata is busy carrying out his other duties. (The robot will also, apparently, tweet.)

Through a gig that is this high-profile, literally, the robot will also serve as a nice little advertisement for the Kibo Project itself. The fact that a marketing agency is part of the project's team is telling -- because, for all the sense that andro-nauts make, the ultimate goal is for the robots to be used on Earth, too. "Kibo" means "hope." And JAXA is hoping that the humanoid robots will be used for terrestrial undertakings like elder care and general companionship. "It would be a 'communication robot' -- for preventing isolated individuals from feeling lonely," JAXA said at the time.

Speaking of "isolated individuals," another thing that will have a companion in all this is the robot itself. Wakata's robot friend will join NASA's American androids -- one of which at right -- which are being developed to help astronauts with tasks that are either too mundane or too dangerous for humans to do. Their names? Robonaut and Robonaut2.